MS Project

MS Project Memo:

                Recently several employees of our company have asked about the potential use of Microsoft Project in our work place. The memo is to address that question as well as provide some potential insight into the Microsoft Project package for those in our company that might be unfamiliar. Before addressing the option for adding Microsoft Package to our software suite lets first begin with some background.

Techsoup Defines Microsoft Project as:

"The ancestor of project-management tools, with powerful functionality that is beloved by many professional project managers but might be overkill for small or even medium-sized teams. As opposed to many of the other tools on this list, Microsoft Project is strongly focused on defining a detailed plan up front, and then updating the plan over time to account for actual time spent and actual dates hit. It assumes that there will be a central project manager who is overseeing the plan — and that this manager will have a number of hours per week to devote to keeping the plan up-to-date. But with that investment, it offers powerful ways to see the effects of changes to your project, the allocation of your team members, and more."

http://www.techsoup.org/support/articles-and-how-tos/six-views-of-project-management-software

One of the points to highlight from the above passage is that Microsoft Project is strongly focused on defining a detailed plan up front. This portion is significant and cannot be underrated. The impact in planning and being able to utilize a software to organize and detail plans for a project is huge. We can significantly reduce potential errors, wasted time, and maintain scope over the long term by planning ahead. These impacts can result in significant savings, both literal or in the cost avoidance category.

To further stress the point of the impact with planning the following two sections from Rita Mulcahy’s PMP Exam Prep 8^th Edition are useful:

Now, while I discussed the impacts in a positive way, this is not to say that Microsoft Project is the answer to our company. The impact in business that I referred to above is utilizing a software. MS Project is expensive. Some basic procurement searches show that MS Project would cost between $500 and $1000 per user depending on the level of support required. Also, the software to some degree complicated for many of the lower experienced project managers in our company. Equally, more experienced users tend to dislike the constraints of MS Project.

The following is some interesting excerpts from Chartgantt.com

“Many first-time project managers find MS Project too complex to learn and understand. Many of the biggest features take years to get down pat and work with. This complexity usually leads to them looking for less complex approaches to establishing a Gantt Chart or spreadsheet view of their Project planning data.

Knowledgeable project managers are becoming increasingly disappointed with MS Project and its many contrasting implementations. Someone will be used in MS Project enterprise edition to manage projects over an organisation. The architecture of MS Project provides a much greater degree of rigidity than many project managers would like."

http://www.chartgantt.com/blog/project-management-alternatives-to-working-with-ms-project

As a company trying to do the best for our shareholders and customers alike, we need to aim for the products that make sense for our needs. The positive impact of a project management software cannot be understated, however, I would have to argue that with the costs and resource constraints MS Project wouldn’t have a strong linear impact that would justify the move. We should aim to explore alternatives such as Project Libre (which openly bills itself as a replacement for MS Project), GanttProject, BaseCamp,  Central Desktop and ToDOList.

Regards,

AJ Varghese

For Additional Reference Please see the below:

Basecamp

Easy to use, and widely popular, Basecamp might well be a good choice for teams without complex needs. It's focused on supporting the needs of geographically remote teams, and offers strong functionality in document-sharing, document collaboration, shared calendaring, and notifications when something changes. It's considerably more limited in the realm of planning and even task-management, however. For instance, there's no ability to create dependencies between tasks, see a Gantt chart, or define a calendar deadline for a task. It offers a number of different levels, starting at $24/month to manage up to 15 projects with unlimited users.

Central Desktop

Central Desktop is conceptually similar to Basecamp, but is somewhat more powerful. It's particularly strong in integrating with email-based workflows. For instance, you can not only share documents, calendars, tasks, and get email notifications of updates, but you can easily copy a Central Desktop email address to have emailed comments automatically entered into the appropriate place in your project files. It has a free version that supports up to two workspaces and five users, or otherwise a number of different pricing schemes, including a $25/month plan for up to 3 workspaces and 10 users, or a "community plan" that's simply $3 per user per month. Ask about additional nonprofit and charity discounts.

If Basecamp and Central Desktop look interesting to you, there are a number of other web-based, collaboration-focused tools in the same vein. For instance, you might want to consider GoPlan, DotProject, or Zoho Project.

DreamTeam for Salesforce

Those that are using Salesforce to manage their constituents should consider DreamTeam, which is free to nonprofits and charities for up to 10 licenses. This tool straddles the gap between Microsoft Project and the collaboration-focused web-based project-management tools, with solid support for project planning and Gantt charting as well as the more typical collaboration and document-sharing functionalities.

And

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/five-apps/five-free-microsoft-project-alternatives/